Check Your Restaurant Credit Card Receipts
Heartland Payment Systems reports that a new MasterCard mandate effective October 1st means the expiration date of your credit card should not appear on your electronically printed merchant receipt. Heartland recently was awarded the Delaware Restaurant Association’s “Allied Member of the Year” for its work in keeping Delaware restaurant owners and operators up to date with just this kind of information.
“We greatly appreciate Heartland’s support,” said Carrie Leishman, president and chief executive officer of the DRA. “Heartland’s involvement in our organization has been invaluable in helping us grow our membership and expand our mission, improving our ability to meet the needs of our members.”
Specifics about the new Mastercard policy are available here. Below is the abbreviated version.
The credit card companies’ Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS) — which dictate mandatory security requirements for all businesses that process, store or transmit credit and/or debit card information — the federal government, and even individual states, cities and counties — all have slightly different guidelines for protecting cardholder information. All, however, require limiting — or truncating — the customer account information that appears on receipts.
For example, the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act (FACTA), a federal law addressing identity theft prevention measures, requires electronically printed customer receipts to list no more than the last five digits of the credit/debit card number and not show the card’s expiration date. Visa® and MasterCard® mandate that no more than the last four digits appear on receipts, while Discover® and American Express® advise merchants to follow state truncation laws.
Visa and MasterCard have the strictest mandates which also meet FACTA and PCI DDS. To comply with Visa and MasterCard standards, you must display only the last four digits of the Primary Account Number (PAN) on a customer’s electronically printed receipt. You must include fill characters that are not blank spaces or numbers for the preceding PAN digits — for example, XXXX XXXX XXXX 1234 or **** **** **** 5678 . You must also omit the expiration date on customer receipts. And, effective October 1, MasterCard mandates that electronically printed merchant receipts must also omit the card expiration date and strongly recommends that the receipts include only the last four digits of the PAN.
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